MAGNIEN (21) 19.10.2023

On 19 October 2023 at 20:08, the sole reporting witness was behind the house putting the hens away when bright round objects appeared to move in all directions across the sky. After briefly interrupting the observation, the witness returned to see 3 lights side by side on the ground and a nearer, stationary luminous silhouette slightly to their right. The silhouette disappeared, and the witness then described the 3 lights as passing overhead before vanishing too. The witness took 2 photographs of the latter 2 phenomena and later supplied further photographs from later in 2023 and late 2024 showing one or more of them. No other accounts reached GEIPAN (see the investigation report). GEIPAN judged the evidence good because the photographs could be analysed, despite the single witness. It defines evidential support as the amount of information collected for an account that is considered reliable and objectively established. The first, unphotographed moving lights might have been satellites, but insufficient reliable data prevented a firm conclusion. Geographical and photographic analysis identified the 3 aligned lights, called UAP 1, with certainty as wind-turbine lights approximately 15 km away. Their repeated appearance at the same positions in photographs taken at different times, along with colour and flashing, supported that identification. The account's apparent overhead passage remains part of the reported sequence despite that finding. The final, repeatedly photographed ground-level silhouette, UAP 2, could not be precisely identified. GEIPAN considered it probably a luminous object of unknown type or a person, perhaps using a torch, unrelated to an aerospace object. The investigation could not establish its nature reliably. GEIPAN assigned separate classifications: C for the first moving lights because satellites could neither be confirmed nor ruled out; A for the 3 photographed aligned lights, identified as wind turbines; and C for the photographed luminous silhouette because the probable ground object could not be characterised adequately.